Purina's Petfinder

The Approach

UX Research

Partnering with the user research team to analyze user feedback & current pain points around the user experience.

I also ran a full UX audit to really identify the embedded issues from the "testing environment" approach and determined a list of priorities sorted by impact and effort that would get us to our ultimate goal in the shortest time possible.

Lastly, I did an analysis of the consumer website to understand what worked well and what didn't. The discoveries here and the success of my efforts actual led to me leading design of the consumer website also, but more on that later ;)

Exploration & Ideation

I started by fully remapping the userflows to establish new happy paths that decreased the interaction cost and provided a more seamless user journey for this demographic.

After, we had to stagger the design approach of updating the design system to be fully accessibility compliant and aligned with the brand as this would have gone beyond the identified timeline, keeping the focusing on improving the userflows first.

I then facilitated rounds of feedback and workshop sessions to agree on the iterations for these solutions and how they would evolve over the year and what should follow after.

Testing & Validation

We ended with testing with users, doing both moderated and unmoderated tests to validate our design decisions and identify any points of friction.

Key Design Decisions

The major point of friction was that the traditional search experience was the primary way of trying to convert user sign ups and profile completion but it was very apparent after research, that there was significant misalignment with the user intent at this point in the flow and actual increased user friction. This led to the exploration phase of identifying how else we could approach profile completion. Here are the 3 considerations that were the primary points I prioritized addressing:

1. Managing Zero Engagement

How might we encourage users to engage if our solution is totally ignored/missed?

2. Managing Abandonment v1

How might we resurface solutions to reengage the user without increasing friction?

3. Managing Abandonment v2

How might we get interested users to complete their profile with the smallest interaction cost?

I presented this to the major stakeholders and got buy in with my alternative to have a progressive disclosure design pattern to create an alternative to meeting the user needs of finding the ideal pet. My aim was to make that user journey much shorter with much less friction and gating the "aha" moment with a need for profile completion.

My final validated solution solved for each of these major points while getting buy in to address other UI issues on the home screen that would have hindered the primary focus being on the new approach as shown in the screenshot below (example: the blue on the cards serves no primary purpose and may be above in the visual hierarchy if left).